yes. THAT was the dumbest thing. Let the queen go, and she’ll be vaporized in T Minus 10 minutes with no fuss. Instead, Ripley pissed her off so much she came after her. With Consequences. And of course, Ripley threw the bandolier of grenades into the fire. If she’d had even one of those grenades a minute later, the queen wouldn’t have been an issue.
I liked how it came down to the alien queen and mother to all of those eggs versus Ripley, the surrogate mother to Newt.
Also it presumably ate through the transaxle of the APC after Ripley runs an alien over and the machine starts “grinding metal”.
As for the reactor, I assumed it was a little from Column A, a little from Column B. Shooting up the cooling system did it no favors and may have caused a meltdown over time but the dropship crash made that part moot. Also, just because everything didn’t instantly go boom doesn’t mean that spraying machine gun fire at the cooling system was a good idea.
This makes sense, but then you have the following problem, which is that there are two copies of almost the same conversation in the same scene, with no indication that they are actually the same conversation:
Ripley: Why can’t we shut it down remotely
Bishop: The crash caused too much damage [to the communications stuff we’d use to communicate with the main colony]
30 seconds later
[Can we use the main colony’s comms to pilot in the dropship]
And the response is… basically the same thing? But with no indication that this is a repeat of the conversation they had just moments before about the crash severing comms. It’s sloppy writing one way or another.l
ETA: You have convinced me that it is the rifle fire that caused the meltdown, and the later scene is just a bit badly written.
Ripley pulls the trigger when she sees an egg starting to open, meaning the queen broke the deal. She flames all the eggs to make sure no face-huggers come after them.
Oh, and my “dumbest moment” of Aliens is when they say the Nostromo was worth twelve million dollars. It’s such a low sounding number for a spaceship that it always makes me laugh. And don’t bother telling me that it’s future spacebucks and probably worth eleventy bajillion dollars in USD, it’s still a number that pulls me out of the scene every time no matter how I rationalize it.
I don’t know that the queen “broke the deal,” exactly - I assume the queen doesn’t actually control when an egg opens, and that just happened because it was “ripe” and there was a victim nearby. The way the scene is shot, it certainly looks like Ripley interpreted it that way, but I think it’s more that she realizes that she’s only safe so long as she’s directly threatening the eggs. As soon as she’s out of range, the queen is going to send all the drones guarding the eggs after her, along with whatever hatches out of them.
The CEO of Weyland-Yutani is Dr. Evil.
It was a poorly conceived scene: I think the eggs are independent - the queen doesn’t make it open, nor does she have the power to stop it. It just does its thing. Stimulus response.
It’s still OK to flame the opening egg, but the point is moot. The whole chamber is going up in T-minus ten minutes (have a nice day!) anyway, so getting revenge on eggs or even the queen is a waste of effort.
Probably felt great, though.
Can’t beat the smell of roasting xenomorph eggs in the morning.
You can also see the marines using the power loaders in a clumsy slow way , you hear one of the yelling about backing up if I remember, so Riply shows them how to do things quickly and efficiently which the Sargent likes.
As Miller alluded, I was going with Ripley’s interpretation. We don’t know if the queen had any control but it’s possible.
I strongly disagree with Ripley’s action being pointless. Face-huggers are fast and Ripley didn’t want any of them chasing her while carrying Newt. Flambeing the eggs was a insurance against that. The worst that can be said is that she got a little carried away.
I think it’s a great, tense scene that ends with some ass-kicking.
It’s a point everyone always points out but how the hell does the Queen latch onto the drop ship and ride into space with absolutely nobody noticing? The Queen is half the size of the thing!
Watching the scene again, I think it would have been better if they’d dropped Ripley’s reaction shot right after the egg opens. Have her flame it instinctively, reacting to the threat it represents, and not as a conscious decision to just start fragging everything. Like when someone drops a beer bottle during a Mexican standoff, and everyone starts shooting.
Make it her own stimulus response reaction, as it were.
It’s been aeons since I saw that movie but I remember the forklift scene, and interpreted it as workplace sexism. All these gruff males didn’t think a female could do anything, so she grabs the biggest machine she can find and says “Where do you want me to put it?” with the clear implication that it’s about to go where the sun never shines.
When Ripley is initially introduced to the Marines, they see her as just dead weight and a liability on what they assume is a routine mission. The Marines largely figure she’s nuts, the grunts are wondering what she’s doing there, etc. She asks if she can help do anything and Apone dismissively asks “I don’t know, CAN you do anything?” and Ripley takes him up on the challenge. He’s not amazed that she can work a loader in a technical sense but he does respect hustle, teamwork and pulling your weight and Ripley is demonstrating traits he admires.
Disagree. While it’s not clear that the queen has any control over the eggs hatching, Ripley doesn’t know that. She made a deal with the queen, and it certainly seemed like the queen may have tried to sneak a facehugger nearby when Ripley wasn’t looking. Ripley’s reaction shot is “Yeah, I saw that. Deal’s off.” It may not have been the most logical thing to do at the time, but personally destroying the eggs is clearly cathartic for both Ripley and the audience.
Plus if the queen already broke the deal while Ripley had leverage, there’s no expectation that Ripley and Newt wouldn’t be hunted down the second they left the hive.
“What do you mean “THEY made a deal”? How could they make a deal, man? They’re animals!”
Is it possible that TPTB wanted incompetent Marines assuming it would make it easier for Burke to smuggle a xenomorph back?
It makes sense…except that the incompetent marines almost ended up stranded on the planet along with Burke. I think it was entirely Burke’s operation. He was the only power that be.
“So now, if I went in and made a major security issue out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was…wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call.”